A Bookish Poem

The Trouble with Reading William Stafford When a goat likes a book, the whole book is gone, and the meaning has to go find an author again. But when we read, it's just print--deciphering, like frost on a window: we learn the meaning but lose what the frost is, and all that world pressed so desperately behind. So some time let's discover how the ink feels, to be clutching all that eternity onto page after page. But maybe it is better not to know; ignorance, that wide country, rewards you just to accept it. You plunge; it holds you. And you have become rich darkness.